Uneasy Virtue

Recession happens approximately once every decade.
With every recession, and even between recessions,
the economy shrinks for many. money reprioritises
where it goes, making an uneasy virtue of being cheaper.

If when you become one of the many
who are valiantly resisting debt,
whilst pushing others there,
because stretched ends won't meet
don't expect others to thank you, 

Because when we rely on others
for what they leave behind,
for others to follow, or find,
then what we leave is a shrinkage.

The Economics Of Royalty

 appal me to the point
where I don't want to reason
why they work the way they do;
however they work they work
money is the least of it,
they work through a deference
which knows that if it were queried
it would prove indefensible.

The Rights And Wrongs Of Despair

It is a despair that common and familiar
that most people don't see it when it is
in front of them, and yet it is acute.
It remains an unknown unknown
whether Kierkegarrd suffered more,
for being more 'authentically' himself
whatever his company, or lack of it,
or whether his pain was better
when it felt more like the pains
that Kierkegaard speculated other people felt.  

 

A Warning From The Present

Now, where is the warning
about reliving the past?

 

The Hope Of Utopia

When I was a child I was slow to talk,
when I was attentive it went unnoticed.

My parents walked everywhere;
dad to work, and the pub, and back,
Mother to the shops or her allotment.
They had no interest in driving.

Mother was often laden, time was often short.
To make me walk faster she would tell me
stories about the lives of my extended family,
something that I felt distant from,
her stories brought the family closer.

To us both our promised 'utopia'
was to travel faster than we could walk.
This meant that rare thing; a ride in a car
driven by a rich relative or neighbour.

This happened most when a relative married
where Mother dad and I attended the wedding.
To get there we were driven in a relative's car,
Mother and I had to be quieter than dad
and he said nothing much to the driver.

Had Mother distracted me with conversation
then I might have felt less car sick less soon,
but dad always wanted us to 'just be quiet',
to hide his discomfort at the formal occasion.

Thus my best 'Utopia'
was when the journey was short;
the sooner I was out of the car
the better to taste the fresh air.

Even in the most utopian of Utopias,
where weddings and marriages are cause
for celebrations, wherever 'there' is,
people will worry 'Are we there yet?'.

When A Child Asks...

and chats with their Christian mother 

I like how God's first instruction in Eden 
to Adam and Eve was to name all the animals,
after all I named many of my toys, it must be the same.

But there are still some things I don't understand,
what language did Adam and Eve use to name the animals?   
And did Adam and Eve name for all the different Dinosaurs?
Did Adam and Eve label the threes and plants as well? 

Finally, did any of the animals disagree, or bargain,
with the names that Adam and Eve foisted on them?'

How is the mother to answer and not disappoint an intelligent child? 

Your A.I. President

of the universe may have less character
than we expect 'him' to have, it is up to us
to decide whether such a lack of character
is potentially criminal, benign, or ineffectual
then 'his' would be human equivalent.

When in doubt check in with his programming
and programmer and remember that humans
are just as much programmed creatures,
where often they praise each other for when
the programming 'goes wrong', and we call it
spontinaeity....   

 

Double Junk (2)

I can't help but enjoy seeing joy
when I see families in the sun
simply out to enjoy themselves.

What disturbs me more
is how when children report
their first pangs of hunger,
then the family queue to be served
at the first burger and chip bar
that they can agree over.

By the time the food has arrives
the child's hunger has passed,
they think  they no longer want to eat,
their appetite has found another focus
where equally soon the child will be bored.

And because it is 'a day out' for the parents
they treat it as a day off from parenting,
rather than query the child before queueing
for the food the child won't want, even as 
they know they will discard most of the food
the moment it lands in their hands. 

Xenophiyophorea At Galapagos Rift

Single cell life forms of  significant size
are extremely rare. These single cell sponge
life forms were first labelled Xenophiyophorea
by Henry Bowman Brady in 1883 and have
changed name several times since.  

They can grow to a diameter of 20 cm/8 inches.
 So far they have been found on the floor of four
of the worlds oceans. Scientists are far from sure
about their role in the food chain, and importance,
 in maintaining life on the ocean floor. What is known
is that when licenses for deep sea mining are granted
they will be no more, as we sterilise the oceans.

 

Conspiracy Theory Politics

Are student politics dressed up in smarter clothing.
They appeal most to yesteryear's students
who are now retired early or middle aged
who distantly remember their student life
when they felt like outsiders to the politics
of a solid career, a child or two, a spouse,
and to round it all off a mortgage for a house,
until slowly, one change at a time
they became the new establishment.

Now they are the older generation
they want to reclaim their radicalism,
their old anger, but their energy is slower
and with their old enemies long gone
their new politics will easily sour 
into random mistrust looking for a target.

There are always plenty to choose from.

I don't know what it means to 'act our age'
beyond gratitude for our days,
and in whatever way we use them
trying to use our time well.     

Not Just In Texas Either....

I am sure that Texan Church goers see
themselves as Christians, and further think
that they are 'taking a moral  lead'
when they legislate to make women
 2nd class citizens compared with men
through reducing or making expensive
their access to apt medical care.
 
 World be wary of where Texas leads...
 

 

The Great Contagion

A fool and his pride are hard to part.
Whoever starts to separate them
will leave the task incomplete
and endure some serious disagreement.

Whoever wants to part a fool
from what they take pride in
will in their own time
also be tempted to pride, 
where they will be cutting it fine
for to retrieve who they are
from the situation they thought
that others were worse in, themselves.

This is The Warning Sign

I would like to see used to illustrate
the lapses from democracy that I see
in the politics of my country. People 
need to smile when they have to be alarmed,
and made angry by how their country's
standards are lapsing from what citizens
ordinarily thought they were entitled to.
Though we will see more of these signs
than we expect when we come to use them.

 

Double Junk

The strangest point about 'junk food'
is how disengaged we are when we buy it.

It starts with the speed at which the brain
registers hunger, which is faster than the time
the food arrives, the chips, the fish, 
the burger with a fig leaf for a salad.

By the time it arrives it looks hideous,
and our appetite has shrivelled to a point
where without remorse all the buyer can do
is wrap the food up, untouched,
and put it in the nearest bin.

It used to be that we were what we ate,
or watched on television, now we are
what we wrap up and throw away,  
where the wrapping mummifies
our shrinking, once swollen, appetite
and preserve it on a landfill site.

Family Life And Other Fictions

 It is rare that my family and I
write to each other nowadays,
twice a year we have nothing to say
so we send each other a cliched picture
the flatness of which says more
than the few words that get written.

But recently I was sent a personal letter
'Those of us that are left are all alright
in our different ways' it summarised..

I thought about this now all-female set up,
and my mind went back to my favourite
situation comedy of the 1980's; 'After Henry'.
There three generations of women thrived
with no man in sight, beyond the gay man
who ran the book shop one of the women worked in.

I thought how much I would like to have been
the gay man who would have been the listening ear
for the women in my family. Through me
they would find their arguments settled.
I was certainly bookish enough.... 

But my family would have none of it
and preferred their malcontents unsettled,
including being audibly homophobic,
whilst knowingly making some males
in the family gay, and then denying it. 

What hope of awareness?
What value in improvement
when implicitly understanding
denies you entry, for being a man?
Never mind accepts your sexuality....   

Existentialism For Dogs

Many a human being has found
that if the carrot is to 'find yourself''
then some odd sticks are required
to motivate them on the journey
but dogs are content with less
-they know the value of companionship.   

 

Another False Horizon

I well remember the few times
that I have been hill climbing.
always before the actual peak
there would several false horizons
before the plateau plateaued off.

'How much is this like sex?',
I thought as I walked. We go
in search of what we are told
is the mapped and the attainable,
only to find our guide, and who we are,
is less reliable than we were led to believe.

In all our mountings
our journey returns us
to where we were misinformed before...       

The Season Of Disguised Complaints

When I was a child my Mother
often spoke in combative tones
'Any complaints? Stick 'em on the wall...
[where they will be ignored
once they have all been put there]'.

We all knew not to take her too literally,
after all which wall, in the room we were in,
would we put them on, assuming we coined them?

The complaints might have broken the pattern
of the wallpaper that dad had chosen,
which looked like it should decorate
a pub fit only for holding a wake in.

Then there was the weighing up how she strove
to make her comment some kind of banter,
vs what if our complaint were genuine?
Where we should our complaint go
if we wanted it to be responded to?

The best cover for such depressing wallpaper
was the cheap cheer of the Christmas cards
that arrived in vast quantities every December
where, with the small silver plastic tree,
they formed part of the seasonal decorations.

Those cards disguised our complaints
at how bad we felt the rest of the year was.  

How Many Flags?

Do you see on the border of this billboard?
I counted probably around sixty, and I could not say
which country they were for though  I could find
where said country is on an atlas.

They are places that were reinvented by colonialism.
Each place had to reinvented itself as a nation,
a state, as it threw off it's colonial master.

For the UK to declare itself 'inclusive'
'multi-faith', 'multi-cultural' etc is a very small price
to pay for it's history of looting so many countries.     

 

Sunday Sermon

The point of religion is ritual,
the point of ritual is to bind old 'superstitions'
to modern contradictions using old concepts
that puts both in a context where those
who share the ritual say, in shorthand to each other,
'We can live with this, please give us more.'
to the overarching authority they believe in.

Religion is the will to celebrate
in spite of what it is up against.  
It is also the will to find community
in spite of local division and enmity,
and last but not least it's leadership
has to be gentle and consensual
for the faith to be open the all.
even when inclusiveness looks like weakness.

Modern secular humanism is a brittle peace
built on the comforts of modern Capitalism
that shrinks away from obvious discomfort
whilst pursuing a Panglossian consensus
where everyone gets what they want
without having to think much to get it.

The world as conceived by humanists
is always the best of all possible worlds;
it has to be for them to want to live in times
where indecisive chatter is how choices are made,
the nearest they agree to be with ritual. 

The world according to those with faith in ritual,
and in life always falls short of what it was meant to be,
but by entering into the ritual they find again
the hope that something/someone will intervene
to make them the means that can remake it better.

In the long view we are all pilgrims
seeking the signpost for progress,
wary that the route thereafter
may be more circular than it first appears... 

The Self Renewing Lust For Precious Metals

Is part of us, part of how we measure time.
Scientists know little about how many lived,
and how they died, as the ages of stone, 
Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic,
became the age of bronze, then of iron.

In the ages of stone there were no empires,
so mathematics was not required.  

But historians of more recent times 
can measure how valuable a metal was
by the numbers of humans that died
in the pursuit of metals like gold.

Europeans plundered South America,
and mis-described the tribes they met,
who were peaceful in themselves.
When the Europeans invaded,
looking for gold to take away,
the made the forced conversion
of the native tribes 
to Christianity 'their lasting gift',

The invaders thought nothing
of the diseases they carried,
to which natives had no resistance.

So many natives died
from the diseases the invaders
did not know they carried 
as much as they did not know
they had a resistance to,
that one has to wonder
what the gold was worth,
in the numbers of germs
and the numbers of deaths. 

The invaders credited the natives
dying in vast numbers to God,
for their previous unbelief.

I wonder which destructive sea deity
scientists and corporations will credit today,
with the death of previously unknown,
and unrecorded marine life,
as a result  of so called 'deep sea mining'
destroying their habitats,
seeking metals so rare that there
are barely any there to be had? 

Enquire Within? But Not Too Closely...

Every suicide seems terrible
to those who thought they knew
the person who killed themselves
well enough that they did not think
deep enough to ask the unaskable.

How such a lack of curiosity
can lead to so serious an end,
death by the person's own hand,
forces open the incurious mind,
and indicts the tamed and timid, 
in ways that no other act can. 

But the living should know
that part of their life will be
to mark the passing of the newly dead
with a certain respect,
even when they died by their own hand.

It is a part of life that they will pass on,
with variants, to others in their own turn
when their passing has to be marked.

The living have all the tools required,
the legal procedures, the comforting words,
and all the collective gestures
through which we can disguise
how they misunderstood the departed.

What seems worse than suicide to me
is how as we breed we extend the secrecy
via which our greatest truths are revealed. 
Mostly through our greatest acts of desperation. 

Every Day Is Orwell Day

George Orwell's '1984' was published on London on this day in 1949. It was published in New York five days later. The book was an immediate best seller. George Orwell died seven months later. The following quotes by the author were taken from a then-new foreword to the book written by Robert Harris on the sixtieth anniversary of that publication, as published in 2009.  

'All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or "the classless society", or "the Kingdom of Heaven on earth", are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way to power...  .'.

'The new "managerial" societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia and America.'.

'These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will be unable to conquer one another completely.'. 

Here is the whole of the foreword.

"Change Is Freedom, Change Is Life

 It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.

There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”

Ursula Le Guin 'The Dispossessed; An Ambiguous Utopia'

The Education Of The Heart

has to happen in a world led by lies
that are as supple and varied
as said education has to be.

Whoever resists the herd
to hear themselves better
discovers their fragility
along with their instincts
and their individuality.

Where they find again
that they are differently alone.  

Quentin Crisp

Could have explained the popularity
of Donald Trump. and other demagogues
who have become popular since his death,
if more people had listened to Crisp
when he was highly quotable and he said... 

'Charisma is the ability to influence without logic'.

This sentence alone would explain
why when he is interviewed on television
Trump starts thinking as he speaks,
but he never completes a thought.

Part way through another  thought
comes to him and the interviewer,
who should tell Trump to finish the first thought,
seems to be overwhelmed by the Trump charisma.

Crisp, by comparison, was an excellent
television interviewee, he tidied up
all his thoughts, as he presented himself
as more composed than television suggested
that anyone, once so marginalised, had a right to be.  

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (29)

Whenever I hear the phrase 'A lazer-like focus'
to describe how a particular government policy
has targets that the government wants the public
to know they know about, and are going to hit,
then I know that the real policy is distraction,
and the more the target is discussed, and missed,
the better it distracts from the real subject,
so far unmentioned, that the government seek to avoid.

Oh for the lazer-like avoidance of hope being achieved!   

Is There Anybody In There ?

A.I. is the human echo chamber,
sold with a sophisticated image
that lacks the intelligence
it is said to contain, inside.

It fools those fail to recognise
how it feeds off the voices it finds
and returns to those who ask of it
what they had not the curiosity
or wherewithal to discover
by more personal means.

The kind of people who believe
that A.I. is 'intelligent' probably
have had parents who were raised
by parents who used television
as a child minder; when the adults
in the house saw was how 'settled'
the children seemed to be,
what the adult missed how similar
in appearance passivity
and looking settled are. 

Picture Set Of The Month - June - The Rugs Of Faig Ahmed

'Oiling', the name of this rug, is one of many 
strange looking rugs are the inspiration
of Azerbaijan rug maker Faig Ahmed.

Faig was born in 1982

rug 2

Find his website here.